Uber Said to Be Near Investment Deal With Baidu

An Uber driver in Newport Beach, Calif., gets a ride request on his cell phone.Credit Christine Cotter for The New York Times

Uber has already raised billions of dollars from investors in the Western world. Now, it is close to receiving even more from one of the most powerful Internet companies in China.

The start-up is close to securing an investment worth hundreds of millions of dollars from Baidu, China’s top search engine, a person briefed on the matter said on Friday.

The pending deal would come on top of a mammoth $1.2 billion financing round that Uber closed last week. Even with that huge sum of cash, the company left open the possibility of raising as much as $600 million, which a person close to the company suggested could come from a Chinese technology concern.

Forging a partnership with Baidu could help Uber with its most ambitious goal to date: becoming the world’s private car service. No longer content with dominating the burgeoning “ride-share” business in the United States — an industry the company helped pioneer — it has set its sights on expanding its operations around the globe, including in China.

Though Uber has become a behemoth, valued at about $40 billion by investors, it has struggled to compete in China against local competitors backed by that country’s other two Internet titans, the Alibaba Group and Tencent. The startup has operated in China for about a year.

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Joining with Baidu could provide a wealth of resources to help strengthen its operations there. The Chinese search giant is expected to provide Uber with access to its huge amount of data and its core map service.

Baidu could also help Uber in dealing with local authorities, a potentially important aid as the start-up grapples with regulatory pushback around the world. Spain, Thailand and several cities in India and the United States are among the regions that have banned Uber’s mainstay service, at least temporarily.

In return for its investment, Baidu will be allied with a mobile service that will help it be more competitive with Alibaba and Tencent.